Solid-state drives (SSDs) are the holy grail of storage. The promise of RAM speeds and hard disk like persistence have for years driven us crazy with power user lust, but they've stayed tantalizingly just out of reach. Always too expensive, too small, and oddly too slow. Has that changed? Can you now miraculously have your cake and eat it too? Can you now have it both ways? Is balancing work with family life now as easy as tripping over a terabyte drive?

In a pioneering series of blog articles Kevin Burton conducts original research on next generation SSD drives in real world configurations. For an experience report on his great adventure you can turn to:

A lot of fascinating findings so far. Unfortunately Goldilocks may still find the porridge too slow. SSDs turn out to be fast, but not as fast as you might hope in out of the box configurations. MySQL on SSD is fast for sequential reads and writes, but random reads are writes are relatively slow. Kevin speculates "Log structured filesystems can come into play here and seriously increase performance by turning all random writes into sequential writes" and that "Bigtable and append only databases would FLY on flash."

The upshot for me is we need a storage engine designed specifically for SSDs as they provide a very different design space from hard disks. Kevin has a lot of excellent details and observations on his site and he'll no doubt be coming up with a lot more.